The core question of this thesis is whether economic growth can be decoupled from natural resource use and ongoing environmental pollution. It contains three chapters which contribute with theoretical and empirical methods to shed light on this issue from different perspectives. In the first part I investigate the effect of human capital accumulation on the direction of technical change extending the paper "The Environment and Directed Technical Change" by Acemoglu et al. (2012). My model simulates that an increasing knowledge stock of workers tends to direct technical change in favour of intangible goods under some mild economic conditions. If tangible and intangible goods are just weak substitutes the paper further shows that economic growth in the clean sector cannot be too strong when absolute decoupling of economic growth from natural resources is to be achieved. ^The second part contains an analysis of recent energy intensity trends for 40 major economies using a structural decomposition analysis. The focus lies on the question whether improvements in energy intensity were caused by structural change towards a greener economy or by technological improvements. We account for intersectoral trade by using the World Input-Output database and adjust sectoral energy use via the environmentally extended input-output analysis. The results show strong differences between a consumption- and production-based accounting approach across sectors, particularly in the construction and electricity industries. Using the Three Factor Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index method, the decomposition analysis shows that recent energy intensity reductions were mostly driven by technological advances. Structural changes within countries played only a minor role, whereas international trade by itself even increased global energy intensity. ^Compared to a previous study using only production-based sectoral energy data, we find structural effects on energy intensity reductions to be systematically weaker by using consumption-based data. In the last part, I study global CO2 emissions of the service sector with a high share of college-educated workers by using an Input-Output Subsystem Analysis for the years 1995-2009. While the share of production-based emissions of high-skilled service sectors is rather small, a footprint analysis reveals that the emission share of those sectors is considerably higher by using consumptionbased accounting (about 17.7% of total emissions). The subsystem analysis offers a closer look at the origins of carbon intensive goods necessary to meet consumption in high-skilled service sectors by disentangling the supply chain into various channels. ^I find that the emissions embodied in intermediate inputs from the electricity sector are the most important component of the CO2 footprint in those branches. Manufacturing and transport also play an important role for the carbon content of the supply chain. In addition to the global analysis, this paper extents the analysis to region-specific subsystems with a case study of the European Union. Finally, I conduct a structural decomposition analysis (SDA) in order to obtain major drivers of changes in emissions of input factors. I find that increasing global demand of such services is the main driver of emission growth in those sectors. Interestingly, also the structure of intermediate Inputs plays an important role for an increasing environmental footprint.